#Stalin Security

[warningsine]

The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in jail, the country’s prison service has said, in what is likely to be seen as a political assassination attributable to Vladimir Putin.

Navalny, 47, one of Putin’s most visible and persistent critics, was being held in a jail about 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle where he had been sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime”. In a video from the prison in January, he had appeared gaunt with his head shaved.

The Kremlin said it had no information on the cause of death.

In early December he had disappeared from a prison in the Vladimir region, where he was serving a 30-year sentence on extremism and fraud charges that he had called political retribution for leading the anti-Kremlin opposition of the 2010s. He did not expect to be released during Putin’s lifetime.

A former nationalist politician, Navalny helped foment the 2011-12 protests in Russia by campaigning against election fraud and government corruption, investigating Putin’s inner circle and sharing the findings in slick videos that garnered hundreds of millions of views.

The high-water mark in his political career came in 2013, when he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral contest that few believed was free or fair. He remained a thorn in the side of the Kremlin for years, identifying a palace built on the Black Sea for Putin’s personal use, mansions and yachts used by the ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, and a sex worker who linked a top foreign policy official with a well-known oligarch.

In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after a suspected poisoning using novichok by Russia’s FSB security service and was evacuated to Germany for treatment. He recovered and returned to Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested on a parole violation charge and sentenced to his first of several jail terms that would total more than 30 years behind bars.

Putin has recently launched a presidential campaign for his fifth term in office. He is already the longest-serving Russian leader since Joseph Stalin and could surpass him if he runs again for office in 2030, a possibility since he had the constitutional rules on term limits rewritten in 2020.

#Alexei Navalny #russia #news tag

[sixty-silver-wishes]

Dmitri Shostakovich at Sergei Prokofiev's funeral, 1953.

For context, Prokofiev and Stalin died on the same day- March 5, 1953. Because Stalin's funeral was such a major event in the Soviet Union, Prokofiev's was largely overlooked, despite the fact he was one of the leading Soviet composers of his day. Relatively few people attended his funeral, Shostakovich among them.

Shostakovich and Prokofiev were not particularly close, and had a thorny professional relationship- much of the correspondence between them that I've been able to find appears to be formal criticism of each other's works. As Prokofiev was from an older generation- he was born in 1891, while Shostakovich was born in 1906- they did not always see eye-to-eye musically; Shostakovich experimented with the avant-garde when possible, perhaps in part due to his musical maturation during the socially-liberal NEP era, while Prokofiev's style tended to be more conservative and neoclassical- picking up more influence from Imperial-age composers and fellow emigres to the west (he lived in France and the United States before returning to the Soviet Union in 1936). Their generational difference also partially accounted for how they responded to harsh government criticism- Shostakovich was impacted by the consequences of his 1936 denunciation all his life and, while he suffered greatly during his second denunciation in 1948, was able to develop public and private personas, in both the musical and ideological spheres, to preserve himself and his artistry. However devastating as it was for Shostakovich, the 1948 denunciations took a greater toll on many other composers, Prokofiev included. As Prokofiev did not believe he would be harshly denounced as Shostakovich had been in 1936, he was far less prepared for the censorship and attacks he faced in 1948. As a result of the denunciations, combined with his declining health, his artistic productivity decreased, and he largely regulated himself to writing basic ideological works towards the end of his life.

This is a letter Shostakovich wrote to Prokofiev on the subject of his Seventh (and last) Symphony:

There's speculation as to whether or not Shostakovich was actually impressed by Prokofiev's Seventh Symphony. As Prokofiev was in decline at the time of writing it, the symphony has been criticized for being banal and not being particularly innovative; Rostropovich even claimed that Prokofiev added in its final flourish not for artistic purposes, but to have the piece nominated for a Stalin Prize, which would have meant money and a boost to his reputation after it suffered in 1948. (The Stalin Prize has its own complicated history in its role in Soviet music, and although it was the highest award a Soviet composer could earn, it could sometimes be awarded as a sort of backhanded punishment- an encouragement for composers to write the "right" sort of music, especially after they had been criticized for "formalism." Nonetheless, winning it after suffering a denunciation could mean financial and political security.) Did Shostakovich- who had often traded criticisms with Prokofiev over music- actually like this piece, or was this an effort to encourage a fellow artist to keep composing after suffering mental and physical ailments? This was a private letter and not a public statement, and Shostakovich was typically very straightforward about critiques, so if the entirely positive sentiment for the piece wasn't genuine (the only critique here is that Shostakovich says he wishes the entire symphony was encored!), the letter may have come from a place of concern.

Perhaps the most striking thing about this letter is the line, "I wish you another hundred years to live and create. Listening to such works as your Seventh Symphony makes it much easier and more joyful to live." Maybe by telling Prokofiev that he wished him another hundred years to live and create, Shostakovich was not simply praising the symphony, but encouraging Prokofiev- a composer whom he was often on icy terms with- that he needed to keep living and creating, during a time when it was becoming more and more difficult for him to do so.

#shostakovich #dmitri shostakovich #prokofiev #sergei prokofiev #music history #composers #classical composers #history #soviet history #classical music #music #cw dead body

[sovietpostcards]

What about people spying on each other and reporting to authorities? In the DRR (East Germany) people would report on family or neighbours to the Stasi (state security) about them doing things that implied they were interested in “western decadence”. (Eg, radio or tv antennae facing towards west to pick up signals from west berlin). Was this a same problem in USSR?

It was a big thing during the Stalin era, esp. 1930s (the Great Terror). Everyone was afraid for their lives, and telling on neighbours was often a way to buy a few moments of calm for themselves.

Later, in the 60s etc. spying on neighbours was called providing "signals". It was no longer a matter of life and death but rather "public control". People "signalled" about bad behaviour, profiteering, heavy drinking etc. (The system encouraged it.) At the same time, interestingly, telling on people was seen as a vile act and there was a whole idea of Not Being The One Who Tells.

(The One Who Tells is a single word in Russian, with a strong negative connotation - стукач.)

#asks

[zarya-zaryanitsa]

Stalinist attitudes towards homosexuality and the events surroudning criminalization of homosexuality in Soviet Union in 1934 - excerpts from professor Dan Healey’s book „Russian homophobia from Stalin to Sochi”

In the same chapter I analyze the Soviet return to a ban on “sodomy” in 1933-34. It was a Stalinist measure, proposed by the security police and backed with relish by Stalin and his Politburo. Stalin personally edited the new penal article. This was the moment when the Soviet state adopted a modern anti-homosexual politics, the birth of modern Russian political homophobia. (…)

On September 15, 1933, deputy chief of the OGPU (secret police) Genrikh Yagoda proposed to Stalin that a law against “pederasty” was needed urgently. Stalin and Yagoda used the crude term pederastiia to discuss male homosexuality; but government lawyers revived the tsarist term muzhelozhstvo (sodomy) for the published law that was eventually adopted in March 1934. Yagoda reported that in August-September 1933, OGPU raids had been conducted on circles of “pederasts” in Moscow and Leningrad, and other cities of the Soviet Union. Yagoda wrote that these men were guilty of spying; they had also “politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army and navy.” From a recent collection of FSB archive documents of political cases against young Communists, it is clear that during the early 1930s, the secret police were obsessed with detecting counterrevolutionary moods among young people. Stalin forwarded Yagoda’s letter to Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich, noting that “these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment” and directing a law against “pederasty” should be adopted. In the months that followed, Yagoda the secret policeman steered its passage through the various legislative drafts. (…)

When in mid-September 1933 Yagoda wrote to Stalin, recommending the adoption of a formal law against sodomy, he apparently cited a figure of 130 arrests of “pederasts” for the operations in “Moscow and Leningrad.” According to Ivanov, the archives of the St. Petersburg FSB reveal that during August-September 1933, 175 men were arrested on grounds of homosexual relations in Leningrad alone. The raids on “pederasts” continued and probably expanded to the principal “regime” cities, including Kharkov and Kiev. It appears that somewhere inside the central secret police machinery, an order originated in late July or early August 1933 to begin arrests of “pederasts” known to the authorities on their card-indexes either as “anti-social” or “declassed” elements, or as a security threat with international dimensions. (…)

In the 1993 release of correspondence between Yagoda and Stalin leading to the sodomy ban, one other significant document was published from the same file in the Presidential Archive. It is a sixteen-page letter to Stalin, from a homosexual British Communist, Harry O. Whyte (1907-60), an ex­ patriate journalist living in Moscow who loved a man who was a Soviet citizen. His Soviet lover was arrested sometime during late 1933 or early 1934. The release of the Whyte letter said little about its provenance and the author. It was typical of the 1993 publication that this document also appeared without commentary, but was labeled “Humor from the Special Collections” by archivists or editors who failed to show any historical empathy or intellectual curiosity.

Whyte, who worked for the English-language Moscow Daily News, wrote to Stalin, in May 1934, asking him to justify the new law. The journalist boldly explained why it violated the principles of both Marxism and the Soviet revolution. He argued that persecution of the law-abiding homosexual was typical of capitalist regimes and fascist ones: Nazi Germany’s “racial purity” drive was just the most extreme example of the push in both systems for “labor reserves and cannon fodder.” “Constitutional homosexuals, as an insignificant portion of the population . . . cannot present a threat to the birth rate in a socialist state.” Their position was analogous to that of other unjustly persecuted groups: “women, colored races, national minorities” and the best traditions of socialism showed tolerance of the relatively insignificant number of naturally occurring homosexuals in the population. He asked Stalin, “Can a homosexual be considered a person fit to become a member of the Communist Party?” In a revealing reaction, Stalin scrawled across the letter, “An idiot and a degenerate. To the archives.” Whyte got a blunt answer to his question: he was expelled from the Communist Party; he hastily left the Soviet Union for England in 1935. (…)

The dictator turned to his cultural spokesman Maxim Gorky, to explain the law’s rationale for Soviet and European readers. Gorky wrote an article that appeared in Izvestiia and Pravda on May 23, 1934, and later in a German-language socialist newspaper in Switzerland, in which he compared healthy Soviet youth to the degenerate youth of Nazi Germany. “Destroy the homosexuals - and fascism will disappear” he concluded, propounding the genocide of a social group on the grounds of sexuality. Later in 1936, People’s Commissar of Justice Nikolai V. Krylenko gave a speech to the central Soviet legislature in which he explained that the law was necessary because homosexuals were not healthy workers but “a declassed rabble, or the scum of society, or remnants of the exploiting classes.”

#life in the stalinist utopia am i right #don't let tankies trick you into overlooking the crimes of stalinism #stalinism #ussr #soviet union #eastern europe #lgbt #lgbt history #communism

[tomorrowusa]

Executing your own troops must do wonders for morale. No wonder Russia is losing.

Those comparisons of Putin to Stalin and Hitler are not really hyperbole.

“We have information that the Russian military has been actually executing soldiers who refuse to follow orders,” U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said at a press briefing in Washington on Thursday. “We also have information that Russian commanders are threatening to execute entire units if they seek to retreat from Ukrainian artillery fire,” he added. “It’s reprehensible to think … that you would execute your own soldiers because they didn’t want to follow orders,” Kirby said. “And now threatening to execute entire units. It’s barbaric.” [ ... ]

Kirby said Moscow appears to have resumed the “human wave tactics” of throwing hundreds of poorly trained soldiers at the Ukrainian lines, which the Kremlin first used in the winter offensive last year. “Russia’s renewed offensive is a sobering reminder that President Putin has not given up his aspirations to take all of Ukraine. As long as Russia continues its brutal assault, we have to support Ukraine,” Kirby said.

If Russian troops know that Putin's Mafia-style enforcers are probably going to shoot them, they have plenty of incentive to shoot the pro-régime henchmen first. 💡

It's Day 614 of Putin's 3-day "special operation" in Ukraine. It's getting increasingly difficult for Russia's dictator to find people who will voluntarily fight for his cherished goal of restoring the decrepit Soviet Union in all but name. Just yesterday you may have seen a post here about how kids in Russia are being militarized.

The best advice we can give to Russian males of military age is GET OUT.

Neighboring Mongolia and Kazakhstan are supposed to be beautiful in the autumn. It's the perfect time for a vacation.

Putin has ruined Russia for at least a generation; it's gradually turning into a large version of North Korea. Even if the war ends tomorrow there is little future for anybody in Russia – except maybe in Putin's secret police.

Leaving Russia may be difficult but staying there could become catastrophic.

#invasion of ukraine #john kirby #russia #poor russian morale #russians shooting russians #russia is executing its own soldiers #get out of russia #russia is losing the war #vladimir putin #владимир путин #путин хуйло #добей путина #путин – убийца #путин - военный преступник #путлер #пушечное мясо #бывший ссср #союз постсоветских клептократических ватников #путин – это лжедмитрий iv а не пётр великий #россия - террористическая страна #россия проигрывает войну #уехать за границу #руки прочь от украины! #геть з україни #вторгнення оркостану в україну #україна переможе #деокупація #слава україні! #героям слава!

[warsofasoiaf]

There could even be another layer to the whole russian Moscow terrorist attack. It's very similar to what the chechens did decades ago, and even if it's not them there are other ethnic groups in Russia who gave had much of their young generation sent to the frontlines to die. The very fact that ruusias security/intelligence organizations are stretched thin because of the war likely also means that there now now blindspots in what they know about the population they spy on.

Without question. Rosgvardia is meant to be a national security force but has been deployed to Ukraine. FSB assets have been mismanaged (they badly botched the early portions of the Russo-Ukrainian war to the point where the FSB's Fifth Service was put under house arrest) but they are responsible for counter-intelligence. So any organization with effective organizational capacity could have launched an attack on a soft target - that would include any ethnic unrest from minority areas.

What I find fascinating is that despite everything, the US warned Russia about the attack, and Putin still was caught with his pants down. Big Stalin energy there, of course, but if I was the US president, I'd be shouting this from the rafters. It's a good message: "we're being the reasonable power here and Putin is a menace to his own people to the point of neglecting their security; we have better intel in Russia's own country than Russia itself!"

Of course, if I was the US president, I'd have opened the taps immediately and Ukraine would be a lot better off.

Thanks for the contribution, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

#russo ukrainian war #russia

[beardedmrbean]

In a function room on the edge of Moscow, something unusual is happening.

A group of women are publicly criticising the Russian authorities. Their husbands are among the 300,000 reservists mobilised by Russian President Vladimir Putin for the war in Ukraine in autumn 2022.

And they want them home.

"When will our husbands be considered to have discharged their military duty?" asks Maria. "When they're brought back with no arms and legs? When they can't do anything at all because they're just vegetables? Or do we have to wait for them to be sent back in zinc coffins?"

The women met via social media and have formed a group called The Way Home. They have differing views on the war. Some claim to support it. Others are sceptical about the Kremlin's "special military operation". What seems to unite them is the belief that the mobilised men have done their fair share of the fighting and should be back home with their families.

It is an opinion the authorities do not share.

In Russia public criticism of anything related to the war comes with a risk. Most of the speakers choose their words very carefully. They know there's a string of laws in place now in Russia for punishing dissent. Their frustration, though, is palpable.

"To begin with we trusted our government," Antonina says. "But should we trust them now? I don't trust anyone."

Members of the group are here to share their stories with a local councillor, Boris Nadezhdin. He has been critical of the "special military operation" from the outset.

Curiously Mr Nadezhdin is one of the few government critics who has been allowed onto national television since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He's an occasional guest on TV talk shows.

Right now, the politician is trying to get on the ballot for the presidential election. He maintains that the war has damaged Vladimir Putin's domestic popularity.

"Putin was very popular in Russia because after the 1990s he brought stability and security," Mr Nadezhdin tells me. "Stability and security were the main reason for supporting Putin. Now more and more people have already understood that stability and security are finished."

Russian women campaigning for the return of their mobilised husbands, sons or brothers have come in for criticism from different quarters. Opponents of the war have little sympathy. They condemn the men for obeying the mobilisation order and for taking part in the war.

Supporters of the Kremlin portray the women as Western stooges.

In a recent interview with the Fontanka news site, Russian MP Andrei Kartapolov, who heads the Russian Duma's defence committee, claimed that the call for demobilisation was the work of "[Russia's] enemies". He appeared to suggest that the Ukrainian military or the CIA was behind it.

Mr Kartapolov also invoked World War Two.

"Can you imagine a delegation of wives coming to the Kremlin in autumn 1942 and telling Stalin: 'Let those men who were called up in 1941 go home. They've been fighting for a year already.' No-one would ever have thought of doing that."

Maria Andreeva, whose husband and cousin have been drafted and despatched to Ukraine, finds Mr Kartapolov's comments insulting.

"He dares to liken the special military operation to the Second World War," Maria tells me. "Back then Russia's aim was survival. We'd been attacked. There was full mobilisation and martial law. It's the total opposite of what is happening now."

Maria says that she is not only campaigning to bring back her family members. She wants to prevent more Russians being called up and sent to the front line.

"We do not want a second wave of mobilisation," she says. "We're against civilians being used in a military conflict. And we want all Russian citizens to understand this could affect them, too.

"Some people act like ostriches. They stick their heads in the sand and try not to think about what's happening. I can understand them. It's hard to accept that, in your country, the state doesn't need you to be happy - it just treats you as biological material. But if people want to survive, sooner or later they need to recognise this and say that they don't agree."

How likely is a "second wave" of mobilisation in Russia? Last December President Putin appeared to rule it out - for now. Live on Russian TV the Kremlin leader claimed that in 2023 the Russian authorities had managed to recruit nearly half a million volunteers to fight in Ukraine.

"Why do we need mobilisation? As things stand there is no need," the Kremlin leader concluded.

Of course, "as things stand" doesn't mean "never going to happen". Situations can change.

For example, in March 2022 President Putin declared: "Conscripted soldiers are not participating and will not participate in the fighting. There will not be an additional call-up of reservists, either. Only professional soldiers are taking part."

"Partial mobilisation" was announced six months later.

To raise awareness Maria and other wives of mobilised reservists have started a new tradition. Every Saturday they don white headscarves and travel into the centre of Moscow. Near the Kremlin walls they lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Red carnations are placed by the Eternal Flame. It is their form of peaceful protest.

On its Telegram channel The Way Forward explains that these flowers are for honouring "the lives of loved ones. To honour the memory of those killed in all wars. To honour the memory of our guys."

The group also believes that flower-laying is a way of saying "never again".

But how aware is Russian society? How much interest is there from the public in what the families of mobilised reservists are saying? Antonina says that since her partner was drafted, she hasn't felt much support from those around her. When he received his call-up papers in October 2022, he'd asked friends to keep an eye out for Antonina.

"They invited me to celebrate new year with them a year ago," she says. "But all evening they kept telling me that my husband was a total mug for going there [to Ukraine]."

Antonina claims that, despite being diagnosed with stomach ulcers, her partner was deployed to an assault unit in Ukraine. She says that he telephoned her on 4 December.

"He was crying. He was frightened. It sounded like he was saying goodbye."

She says he called again on 13 December. That was the last time she heard from him. Antonina says she's since been told that her partner was wounded in action.

"There are some people who want to fight. Who volunteer for it and sign contracts," Antonina says. "Let them fight. But send us back our husbands who don't want to be there. They've done their duty to the motherland. Send them home.

"I used to have enormous respect for Vladimir Putin. Now I'm more neutral. I still find it hard to believe that he knows this kind of thing is happening. But if he really does see us as traitors and outcasts for wanting our husbands back, I don't understand why he'd have this attitude towards citizens who once voted for him."

#nunyas news #difference between this and ww2 #is you attacked this time

[stillunusual]

Little pooty's big Polish tantrum…. On 21st July 2023, in a typically deranged rant, Muscovy's fascist dictator Vladimir Putin "reminded" Poland that its western territories were a "gift from Stalin" (among numerous other lies).

He began this particular outpouring of anti-Polish verbal vomit with some unsubstantiated claims that Poland was "hatching revanchist plans" to take territory from Ukraine and Belarus….

Claiming that Poland has ambitions to annex western Ukraine and Belarus, which before the Second World War (and for hundreds of years before the partitions of Poland) were part of the Polish state - and scaring the Russian population into believing that this could happen at any moment - has been a staple of the Kremlin's propaganda for a long time (and is frequently repeated by mindless vatniks and tankies all over social media). However, Russia has no evidence whatsoever to back up these baseless and nonsensical claims. It's true that Poland boosted security at the Polish-Belarusian border in July 2023, but this was in response to the arrival of Wagner Group mercenaries in Belarus, following their short-lived rebellion in Russia (after which their leader was killed in a mysterious plane crash, which I'm sure was a complete coincidence). Putin then went on to claim that Poland "took advantage" of the Russian civil war to "annex some historical Russian provinces"….

Not surprisingly, this was also lie. What actually happened is that after the First World War, newly independent Poland managed to reclaim some of the territory that was stolen by Prussia, Austria and Russia during the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century - and that included the aforementioned areas of Ukraine and Belarus, which were historically more Polish than Russian.

Much of what is now western Ukraine has been periodically incorporated into the Polish state ever since the beginning of the 11th century, at the time of the Kievan Rus. And the lands of present day Belarus and Ukraine were part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania when it was united with Poland towards the end of the 14th century. The entire territory of modern Belarus and most of Ukraine remained as part of the Polish-Lithuanian state until the end of the 18th century. Eastern Ukraine was ceded to Russia in the second half of the 17th century and Russia subsequently stole most of the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian state at the end of the 18th century when it conspired with Prussia and Austria to wipe Poland off the map (just like Hitler and Stalin did 150 years later). As well as most of the lands of present day Poland, Russia acquired all of what is now Belarus and more of Ukraine. The area of western Ukraine that was re-claimed by Poland after the First World War became part of Austria and was therefore never in Russia - let alone a "historical Russian province".

Today's Russian propagandists like to claim that Belarus, Ukraine and Russia have always been one nation, but the reality is that although all three had common origins in the Kievan Rus, they subsequently underwent hundreds of years of separate development before Belarus and Ukraine were incorporated into the Russian empire and subjected to prolonged periods of forced russification.

After regaining its independence and defeating the Soviets in the Polish-Soviet war, Poland and the newly formed Soviet state ended up dividing Ukraine and Belarus between them. The Treaty of Riga, which was signed in 1921, defined Poland's eastern border about half way between where the Polish-Russian border had been prior to the partitions of Poland and where Poland's eastern border is today. Poland basically managed to reclaim some of what it had previously lost. The Soviets renounced their claims to all territory to the west of the new border, but nevertheless they invaded and occupied it two decades later in 1939. Putin then started hypocritically whining about "Polonisation" policies in eastern Poland during the 1920s and 1930s….

Kremlin propagandists like to use tensions between Poland, Ukraine and Belarus over this historical period to create division. Poland had emerged from over a century of foreign rule by the partitioning powers, during which Prussia and Russia had done their best destroy the Polish language, culture and identity in the territories they stole from Poland, by adopting policies of forced germanisation and russification. So it's not surprising that the new Polish government wanted to reassert Polish identity after decades of struggle to regain national independence, which inevitably led to conflicts with Poland's minority populations. However, interwar Poland, for all its faults, was a relatively liberal society compared to its tyrannical neighbours, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Those Ukrainians and Belarusians who found themselves on the Polish side of the border with the USSR missed out on such delightful aspects of Soviet life as forced collectivisation, dekulakisation, the holodomor, the gulags, the Yezhovshchina (purges), the crippling poverty and backwardness, the brutal suppression of their religious and community life and the total lack of freedom. They may not have been overjoyed about living in Poland, but it was paradise in comparison.

Likewise, Poland's minorities were also much better off than, for example, Britain's colonial subjects all over the world and the USA's black and native American minorities. Putin then repeated his previous lies about Poland's "aggressive policy" in the interwar period causing the Second World War….

This is typical Kremlin historical revisionism, as well as being complete bullshit. In 1939, Hitler gifted eastern Poland to his ally Joseph Stalin in the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was presented to the world as a simple non-aggression treaty, but was really a plan to carve up Europe between Germany and the USSR - involving the mutual invasion and partition of Poland, a free hand for Hitler to attack Western Europe and for Stalin to annex the Baltic states, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and to attack Finland. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact led directly to the outbreak of the Second World War almost immediately after it was signed, and was also the first step in a continuum of collaboration between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that lasted for the next two years, until Hitler broke the pact by launching Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Putin also claimed that Poland's "independence and statehood was restored thanks to the Soviet Union"….

This was a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly.

The USSR's occupation of eastern Poland was accompanied by mass looting, rape and murder. This territory had a mixed ethnic and religious population (mainly Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Jewish) which had existed for hundreds of years - until World War 2 - when Stalin and his collaborators killed or ethnically cleansed the Polish population (with a little help from Ukrainian fascists) and Hitler and his collaborators exterminated the Jews.

Between February 1940 and June 1941, Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens to Soviet camps, collective farms, exile villages and various outposts of the gulag system. In 1940 the NKVD carried out the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish army officers, police officers, university lecturers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, civic leaders, politicians, government officials, priests and other members of the “bourgeoisie”. Approximately 500,000 Polish citizens dubbed "enemies of the people" were also imprisoned without crime.

The imposition of Soviet rule was accompanied by a campaign of cultural genocide - monuments were destroyed, street names changed, libraries burned, bookshops closed and publishers shut down. The Soviet authorities replaced native teachers with Soviet teachers, introduced communist ideology into schools, forced pupils to learn Russian, limited instruction in Polish and banned the teaching of Polish history.

After the launch of Operation Barbarossa on 22nd June 1941, the NKVD executed thousands of prisoners en masse before running away from the invading Germans.

Nazi Germany's attack on the USSR initially went well, forcing a desperate Stalin to switch sides and join the alliance against Hitler, but the Soviets eventually prevailed (with a lot of help from the capitalist west) and drove the Germans all the way back to Berlin. However, in doing so they didn't restore Polish independence.

The USSR's re-occupation of Poland was accompanied by more looting, rape and murder (and this time the rapes were so extensive that they caused an epidemic of STDs). After the war Poland was trapped behind the iron curtain, subjected to a decade of Stalinist terror and a total of 45 years of Soviet-imposed communist rule. These were wasted years that left Poland bankrupt, destitute and decades behind the countries of western Europe by the time the Polish people were finally able to overthrow Moscow's puppet regime and restore their independence and statehood at the end of the 1980s. As for "reminding" Poland that its western territories were a "gift from Stalin"….

Putin seems to forget that Stalin gifted western Poland to his ally Adolf Hitler in the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, after which Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west and the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, in September 1939.

What actually happened at the end of the Second World War is that Stalin turned Poland into a Soviet puppet state and redrew the borders between Germany, Poland and the USSR, incorporating eastern Polish lands (which he'd initially acquired as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) into the Soviet Union and a smaller area of eastern German lands into Poland, as "compensation". Almost the entire German population of what was now western Poland was then ethnically cleansed and sent to the newly formed Soviet puppet state of East Germany, after which the remaining Polish population living to the east of Poland's new border with the USSR was ethnically cleansed and sent to replace the departed Germans in the west. Apparently, being kicked out of your home after your country has been stolen, and then being forced to go and live in a destroyed and depopulated wasteland hundreds of miles away, is a "gift".

There's a reason why Poland and other countries that Russia invaded and plundered over the centuries, and were also invaded and plundered by the USSR during the Second World War (after which they were forced to live under Soviet occupation for the next half century), rushed to join NATO as soon as they could after overthrowing Soviet rule. It's because ever since the collapse of the USSR, Russia has repeatedly shown that it doesn't respect their right to exist, and it's clear that there can be no long term peace and stability in Europe while Russia still threatens its neighbours and harbours imperialistic ambitions to restore its former empire.

NATO is the main obstacle that prevents Russia from achieving this goal.

NATO poses no threat to Russia's internationally recognised borders, but it does - quite rightly - stand in the way of Russia's desire to expand them.

#vladimir putin #little pooty #history #russia #ussr #soviet union #joseph stalin #germany #poland #second world war #world war 2 #vatnik #tankie #historical revisionism #ethnic cleansing is a gift

[mariacallous]

On the night of February 24, 2022, the sound of missiles jolted Viktor Marunyak awake. He saw flashes in the sky and billowing black smoke; then he got dressed and went to work. Marunyak is the mayor of Stara Zburjivka, a village just across the Dnipro River from Kherson, and he headed immediately to an emergency meeting with leaders of other nearby villages to discuss their options. They quickly realized that they were already too late to connect with the Ukrainian army. Their region was cut off. They were occupied.

Occupied. Marunyak had been expecting the war to break out, but he had no sense of what a Russian occupation of his village might mean. Like his colleagues, Marunyak is an elected official—genuinely elected, since 2006, under Ukrainian laws giving real power to local governments, not appointed following a falsified plebiscite, as a similar official might have been in the Soviet era or might be in modern Russia. That meant that when the occupation began, he felt an enormous responsibility to stay in Stara Zburjivka and help his constituents cope with a cascade of emergencies. “Already, within a few days, there were families lacking food,” he recalls. “There was no bread or flour, so I was trying to buy grain from the farmers … Many residents began contributing the food they could share, and so we created a fund, providing assistance on demand.”

Similar plans were made to locate and distribute medications. Because the Ukrainian police had ceased to function, citizens formed nighttime security patrols staffed with local volunteers. Marunyak prepared to negotiate with whoever the Russians sent to Stara Zburjivka. “I told people not to be afraid, saying, when the Russians would come, I’ll be the first to talk to them.”

He was. And he paid a horrific price for it.

The Russian soldiers who arrived in Kherson—like the Russian soldiers who occupied Bucha and Irpin, the Kharkiv region, Zaporizhzhya, or anywhere else in Ukraine—were not prepared to meet people like Marunyak. To the extent that the invaders had any understanding of where they were and what they were meant to be doing (some, initially, had none), they believed that they were entering Russian territory ruled by an insecure and unpopular Ukrainian elite. Their actions suggested that their immediate goal was to decapitate that elite: arrest them, deport them, kill them. They did not expect this to be difficult.

Their theory of occupation was not new. Soviet soldiers entering the territory of eastern Poland or the Baltic states during World War II also arrived with lists of the types of people they wanted to arrest. In May 1941, Stalin himself provided such a list for occupied Poland. To the Soviet dictator, anyone linked to the Polish state—police, army officers, leaders of political parties, civil servants, their families—was a “counter-revolutionary,” a “kulak,” a “bourgeois,” or, to put it more simply, an enemy to be eliminated.

Russia made similar lists before invading Ukraine a year ago, some of which have become known. Ukraine’s president, prime minister, and other leaders featured on them, as did well-known journalists and activists. But Russian soldiers were not prepared to encounter widespread resistance, and they certainly did not expect to find loyal, conscientious, popularly elected small-town and village mayors.

Perhaps that explains why Marunyak, age 60, was punished with such horrific cruelty after the Russians arrested him on March 21. Along with a few other local men, the Stara Zburjivka mayor was kept blindfolded and handcuffed for three days. Russian soldiers beat him. They gave him nothing to eat and little to drink. One time he was stripped naked and forced to stay in the cold for several hours. A gun was held to his head, and he was threatened with drowning. He was told that his wife and daughters would also be captured. Once, he said, the soldiers choked him until he lost consciousness. They kept demanding to know where he kept his weapons. Because Marunyak fit into no category that the Russians could recognize—perhaps even because his local patriotism and his civic-mindedness seemed strange to them—they decided he must be a secret member of a Ukrainian “sabotage group.” He was not. He had no weapons and no military skills.

Days into his detention, Marunyak was briefly able to see his wife, Kateryna Ohar, before he was transferred to Kherson. The soldiers told Ohar she would not see her husband for 20 years. He was then sent right into another torture chamber, where a different set of Russian soldiers tied wires to his thumbs. In this form of torture, wires are connected to a victim’s fingers, toes, or sometimes genitals. Electric shocks are then delivered using the battery of a field telephone—according to one witness, soldiers described it as “making a call to Putin.” The practice of electrocuting prisoners was used during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and in Russia’s Chechen wars, and it is now in use again throughout occupied Ukraine. But even when Marunyak was tortured and interrogated, he noticed that his captors never wrote anything down. Their questioning was sloppy; he could not work out what they actually wanted to learn. Possibly nothing. Eventually, after days of captivity with next to no food, he was freed, with nine broken ribs and pneumonia. He escaped the occupied zone.

Over the past 10 months, the Reckoning Project has deployed more than a dozen journalists and field researchers to record detailed testimonies of victims of and witnesses to atrocities in areas of Ukraine that are or were under Russian occupation. Lawyers and analysts then seek to verify these accounts, with the goal of providing evidence that will be admissible in future court proceedings. The organization has found that Marunyak’s experience was not unusual. Oleh Yakhniyenko, the mayor of Mylove, another village in the Kherson region, was detained twice. Olena Peleshok, the mayor of Zeleny Pod, was imprisoned for more than two months. Mykhailo Burak, the mayor of Bekhtery village, was detained and tortured. In the formerly occupied territory of Kharkiv alone, police investigators have evidence of 25 torture chambers. The Ukrainian government believes that mayors, deputy mayors, and other local leaders from a majority of the Kherson region’s 49 municipalities were arrested or kidnapped. Some have simply disappeared.

Many of their stories share not only gruesome details but also an atmosphere of unreality. Ukrainian captives were told that the Ukrainian state had discriminated against them for speaking Russian; now they were “free,” the invaders insisted. But when Russian-speaking mayors and other elected officials flatly explained that no one in Ukraine had harmed them for using their native language, or that Russian was widely spoken in the region, the soldiers didn’t have any response. Dmytro Vasyliev, the secretary of the city council of occupied Nova Kakhovka, recalled that his Russian was more fluent and more grammatical than the Russian of the soldier interrogating him. The soldier was a Kalmyk, one of Russia’s minority groups; Vasyliev had been born in Moscow. He considered himself a Ukrainian of ethnic Russian extraction, which confused them: “They couldn’t comprehend why I, Russian by ethnic origin, did not want to cooperate with them,” Vasyliev recalled. “I said, ‘How can I look into the eyes of my son, my colleagues, if I become a traitor?’ They just didn’t get it.” Since his interview with the Reckoning Project, Vasyliev has died.

But even as they inflicted pain on the most civic-minded Ukrainians, even as they assaulted local leaders, Russian soldiers seemed not to know how to replace them. Unlike their Soviet Communist forebears, who could at least name the ideology that had driven them into Poland, or Estonia, or Romania, the modern Russian army seems to have no coherent theory of government or administration, no concrete plans to run the region, even no clear idea of the meaning of Russkiy mir, the “Russian world” that some of President Vladimir Putin’s ideologues extol.

Russian forces do find collaborators to replace elected officials, but many appear to be completely random, unqualified people, with no discernible ideology or previous links to Russia. In some places the invaders have displayed Soviet symbols or flags, perhaps hoping that these older ideas will create some sympathy for Russia among the conquered Ukrainians. But mostly they’ve offered nothing: no explanation, no improvements to life, not even a competent administration. They do immense damage, but they don’t seem to know why.

After the mayors, town councilors, and other elected officials, the Ukrainians who disturb the occupiers most are volunteers: people who run charities, people who run civic organizations, people who spontaneously rush to help others. Perhaps they seem suspicious to Russian officials because their own country crushes spontaneity, independent associations, and grassroots movements. The Reckoning Project interviewed a man from Skadovsk, a part of Kherson province still under Russian control, whom we will call Volunteer A. (He requested anonymity because he fears for his family’s safety.) He had been a member of one of the neighborhood-watch groups that stepped in to replace the police, and had worked at a humanitarian-aid distribution center. After his father was arrested in April 2022, a few weeks into the occupation, Volunteer A went to find him—and was detained as well.

During the subsequent interrogation, Volunteer A was asked about other local activists and about his connection to the Ukrainian security services (none) and the CIA (even less), as well as (ludicrously) George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Like the Soviet officials who treated Boy Scout troops in occupied central Europe like members of a conspiracy, the Russians seemed incredulous that he was just a local volunteer, working with other local volunteers; their questions made it seem as if they had never heard of such a thing. He recalled being beaten simultaneously by four different men, struck by a baseball bat, tormented with electric shocks, and hit with a hammer in an effort to get him to admit he was part of a larger conspiracy. At least one of his ribs was broken. After the interrogation, he was told to make a video confession and to sign a statement declaring that he would not spread “fake news” about the Russian occupation. After a subsequent detention, he too escaped the region.

In another town in the Kherson region also still under occupation, Volunteer B, as we’ll call him (he also fears for his family), had a similar experience. Before Russian forces detained him, he had been running a makeshift pharmacy that collected medical-supply donations. He was interrogated and beaten and, like Volunteer A, asked repeatedly about the true purpose of his charitable work. Who was organizing it? Again, the Russian soldiers seemed unable to believe that no secret group was behind it, that ordinary people were spontaneously contributing to this common project, that information about it simply spread by word of mouth, on social media and on the radio, and not as the result of some dark plot. He was asked to jot down a description of how his group worked: “The way it worked,” he recalled writing, “was that people brought what they had and got what they needed. Provided that we have it.” The Russians kept pressing for more details of the nonexistent conspiracy. Then they confiscated the painkillers he had accumulated, which had been destined for cancer patients.

This man, who was also forced to leave his region, now believes that the interrogators’ real problem was that they feared volunteers were outside their control: “It really pisses [the Russians] off, annoys them,” he said, that anyone can be independent of the state and of the political system—any political system. This helps explain why the list of arrested and tortured volunteers is so long, and why their testimonies are so similar across the various zones of occupation. Ruslan Mashkov, a Ukrainian Red Cross volunteer, was detained by Russian soldiers north of Kyiv in March and interrogated. A woman in the Kherson region who had helped sort humanitarian-aid packages told an interviewer that she had been arrested, given electrical shocks, robbed of her money, and beaten. (She asked not to be identified by name.) Nakhmet Ismailov, another Kherson resident who had organized charity concerts and benefits before the war, was also tortured with electric shocks. Anyone who conducts any independent activity—anyone who engages with civil society or who might be described as a social entrepreneur—is at risk in an occupation zone run by men who may have never encountered a genuine charity or a genuine volunteer organization before at all.

The invaders’ nihilism is particularly notable in their incoherent approach to the Ukrainian educational system. In theory, schools and universities are the focus of careful Russian thought and planning, just as they were once the focus of careful Soviet thought and planning. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Red Army, in an utterly devastated occupied East Germany, took time away from food provision and road reconstruction to issue an edict banning private kindergartens and to set up curriculum-training sessions for new preschool teachers.

In the spring of 2022, Russian occupiers did signal their interest in transforming Ukrainian schools. In Melitopol, which is still occupied, the Russian military abducted a handful of school principals as well as the head of the local department of education, although later the principals were released. In Kakhovka, Viktor Pendalchuk, the director of School No. 1, was detained and interrogated for two weeks before escaping to Ukrainian-held territory.

Still, a large number of schools in occupied areas at first remained closed, or else operated online, as they had done during the early phases of the coronavirus pandemic. The occupiers pressured some educators to return. In one case investigated by the Reckoning Project, witnesses described a geography, math, and computer-science teacher—we are withholding his name because his village in the Kherson region is still occupied—whose home was visited by Russian soldiers in late June; they handcuffed his 18-year-old son, perhaps because he planned to go to university to study Ukrainian history. They put a bag over the teen’s head and then dragged him away. The teacher received a message, via an interlocutor, telling him that his son was alive, was being fed, and would be returned home if the teacher returned to his job. The teacher complied. The son did come back, and described being interrogated, threatened at gunpoint, and tortured with electric shocks.

By autumn, the occupiers had intensified their efforts to Russify the schools, causing a lot of distress among Ukrainian teachers who feared being accused of collaboration by their own compatriots if they showed up at work. But the process remained haphazard, differing from place to place. In at least one town in the Zaporizhzhya region, the Reckoning Project believes, all Ukrainian-language books were removed from schools, including children’s books; elsewhere, only upper-level Ukrainian books, on law and history, were removed. In one Zaporizhzhyan village, still under occupation, soldiers have forced schools to open by threatening to take children from their parents if they do not show up. Elsewhere, low attendance has been tolerated.

Residents of some areas have said that the occupiers imposed a Russian-language curriculum, but many of the lessons were poorly designed. In one school district, just four textbooks were assigned—on the Russian language, Russian history, math, and natural science—and all others were discarded. Asked what she had been doing in school during the time Kherson was occupied, a 14-year-old named Oleksandra recalled that students spent their time looking at their phones.

Higher education suffers from the same erratic policies. Russian soldiers physically occupied Kherson State University, Kherson State Maritime Academy, and Kherson State Agrarian and Economic University, but managed to hold only a small number of classes. In June, while the city was still occupied, the Russians announced that Dmytro Kruhly, one of the teachers at the Kherson State Maritime Academy, would become rector. Everyone else was fired. Kruhly, who previously taught classes about “global maritime distress and safety systems,” announced that the new task of the university was to build a shipyard, but few steps were taken in that direction. After the liberation of Kherson, Kruhly disappeared from the city, probably retreating with the Russians.

Substantial evidence suggests that Moscow had bigger plans for Ukrainian schools but the soldiers on the ground could not implement them. In Vovchansk, a small frontline town in the Kharkiv region, freed in September after six months of occupation, the Reckoning Project obtained a copy of a five-year education plan for schools in the city. The document runs to 140 pages of bureaucratic language, which appears to have been mostly copied and pasted from the educational plans given to schools in Russia, as if no special thought went into the needs of schools in newly occupied territories. It calls, for example, for an annual “Day of Solidarity in the Fight Against Terrorism” to commemorate the infamous 2004 attack on a school in Beslan, in Russia’s North Ossetia region; for lessons about the Nazi blockade of Leningrad in World War II; and for a course on the “basics of the spiritual-moral culture of the peoples of Russia.” The entire document contains only two lines about Vovchansk itself—about visits to the town’s “institutions of culture” and production sites.

Regardless of Moscow’s intentions, the Russians actually carrying out the occupation didn’t really seem to care what happened to the schools. There was no policy equivalent to the systematic Soviet imposition of Marxist language and history on central Europe in the 1940s, not even an equivalent to the imposition of a pro-Russian regime in Chechnya during the second Chechen War. In one occupied town in the Zaporizhzhya region, teachers were ordered to organize celebrations of May 9—the day Russia marks the anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. But the occupying authorities didn’t seem to mind whether attendance was high, or whether anyone learned anything about the war, or whether the celebrations were even real. “A couple of kids will be enough,” they were told. The ritual was for show. The point was to tell Moscow that it had happened, not to teach any real lessons about World War II.

In truth, each region of Ukraine does have its own history and traditions, and some of them are eerily relevant. In 1787, four years after Russia defeated the Ottoman empire and annexed the territory of what is now southern Ukraine and Crimea, the Russian empress Catherine the Great visited the region. The trip was organized by Grigory Potemkin, who was once her lover and remained her favorite minister, and it is from this journey that we have inherited the expression Potemkin village. According to the legend, Potemkin built facades along Catherine’s route and populated them with actors in costumes, pulling them down at the end of every day and putting them up again at the next village, so that the czarina would see only happy peasants and prosperous homes.

Historians doubt that this elaborate piece of theater really happened, but Potemkin’s connection to the region was real: He was buried in a crypt in Kherson, and before the Russians evacuated the city they removed his bones. And the Potemkin-village legend persists because it reflects a phenomenon we recognize: the courtier who creates a false reality to please the distant monarch. For Ukrainians who have lived under Russian occupation, the Potemkin story helps explain what they have experienced. Marunyak, the mayor of Stara Zburjivka, put it like this: “I am following their activities. They are all done for a camera shot in Russia. Even people who live in the occupation don’t believe it is for real. It’s like a huge Potemkin village. It can’t function. They try to glue it together, but it doesn’t work.”

The Potemkin story might also begin to explain the horrific violence that ordinary Russians have inflicted on ordinary Ukrainians. Over and over again, victims told the Reckoning Project that this extreme behavior came from nowhere. There was no provocation. Nothing that Ukrainians have done to Russians either in the distant past or in recent memory could explain the beatings, the electric shocks, the detention centers, the torture chambers in garages and basements, the utter disregard for Ukrainian life. Only the Russians’ frustration with their own incapacity—their inability to make the Ukrainians obey them; indeed, their inability to understand Ukraine at all—might offer a clue. They were told to transform the schools, but they do not know how. They were told to find secret Ukrainian organizations, but instead they found small-town mayors and local volunteers. On the one hand, they have to send a report back to Moscow, proving that they are in control. On the other hand, they are angry because they exercise so little control.

This incomprehension also fits into an older tradition. The Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko wrote a letter in 1928 to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who had dismissed the Ukrainian language as a mere dialect. Ukraine, Vynnychenko told him, was real, whether or not Gorky wanted it to be real. “You can think that the Dnipro River flows into the Moscow River,” he said. But “the Dnipro will not flow into the Moscow River” just because you think so. Wishing Ukraine away will not make Ukraine go away. Rewriting history will not alter the historical memories of millions of people. Russia can try to alter the geography of the region, but that will not alter the geography of the region, no matter how many bodies are beaten or electric shocks are delivered.

The modern Russian occupation also belongs to the equally old, equally ugly traditions of Russian imperialism and Soviet genocide. Moscow wants to obliterate Ukraine as a separate country, and Ukrainian as a distinct identity. The occupiers thought that task would be easy, because, like Putin, they assumed that the Ukrainian state and Ukrainian society are weak. But they are not. That clash between assumption and reality has also forced the occupiers to broaden their use of violence. Wayne Jordash, a British barrister who documents Russian war crimes in Ukraine, argued in a Reckoning Project interview that the extraordinary number of detention centers in occupied Ukraine represent the Russian army’s attempt to fulfill its original plan, which was “to capture and kill all the leaders” of Ukraine. But as the occupation dragged on, “the idea of leaders got bigger. It was originally ‘Zelensky and the government,’ and it quite quickly, inevitably, became ‘local leaders,’ which includes everyone from military to civil servants to journalists, to teachers—anybody who had a connection with the Ukrainian state.”

Failure and incompetence lead to violence; violence creates more resistance; and resistance, so hard for the invaders to comprehend, creates wider, broader, ever more random destruction, pain, and suffering. This is the logic of genocide, and it is unfolding right now, in our time, in the occupied Ukrainian territories that have not yet been liberated, in the towns where Russian soldiers still arrest people arbitrarily on the street, in the villages where the Ukrainian state cannot yet count the torture chambers, let alone shut them down.

Stara Zburjivka itself remains under occupation, although Marunyak, its devoted mayor, now lives in exile in Latvia. From there he tries to keep in touch with his former constituents, to help if he can, to advise or to listen, to keep together the threads of a society that the Russians are cruelly, haphazardly unraveling. “They didn’t understand anything,” Marunyak says now, “but just spoiled people’s lives.” They discovered a world different from the one they knew. And so they smashed it up, hit back at it, and are still trying to destroy it forever.

[cassianus]

A large crowd of people wondered where Jesus had gone. When they heard He had crossed the Sea of Galilee, they clambered into boats and a makeshift armada sailed across the lake, desperate to find Him. It is not, however, because they believed he was the long-awaited Messiah, the Son of God, and the Savior of the world. No. It was because they were hungry. When the crowd finally found Jesus, He said to them, “You are looking for me not because you saw signs, but because you ate the loaves and were filled.”

The day before, Jesus had performed the awesome miracle of feeding 5,000 people with just five loaves and two fish described in today’s gospel. He did this miracle to demonstrate His divine power and to announce that the Kingdom of God was at hand. But the main message the crowd learned from this miracle was, “Wow, this man has free food! Let’s follow him!”

When thinking about this I remembered a story I once heard about Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin:

Stalin called for a live chicken and proceeded to use it to make an unforgettable point before some of his henchmen. Forcefully clutching the chicken in one hand, with the other he began to systematically pluck out its feathers. As the chicken struggled in vain to escape, he continued with the painful denuding until the bird was completely stripped. “Now you watch,” Stalin said as he placed the chicken on the floor and walked away with some bread crumbs in his hand. Incredibly, the fear-crazed chicken hobbled toward him and clung to the legs of his trousers. Stalin threw a handful of grain to the bird, and it began to follow him around the room. He turned to his dumbfounded colleagues and said quietly, “This is the way to rule the people. Did you see how that chicken followed me for food, even though I had caused it such torture? People are like that chicken. If you inflict inordinate pain on them they will follow you for food the rest of their lives.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. Food is very important. Human beings cannot survive very long without food. That’s obvious and it was partly Jesus’ understanding of this need that led him to perform the miracle. But is it possible our desire not just for food, but for any other things that we believe we need to sustain ourselves, can cause us to act like the crowd that chased after Jesus? Or sometimes even like Stalin’s chicken?

Where do we place our faith? Do we enslave ourselves to the things of the world for a moment of security or fullness? Are we easily corrupted by disordered desires? Are there times when we are willing to throw away our freedom and self respect to satisfy our needs?

Jesus did not come as a Master or King to rule and would not allow himself to be seen as such. He did not come to fill bellies but to free hearts and minds. In fact, he made himself the slave and servant of all. He took the burden of the world upon himself. He made himself our very food and drink to nourish us to everlasting life: that we may never hunger and thirst again. He became the servant that we might be raised up to become sons and daughters of God.

If we search our hearts and examine our lives, we may realize that this is not what we in fact seek: that as much as we boast of and prize our freedom in this country, perhaps we are least free of all people – enslaved in the shackles of our own desires and weighed down by our poverty of spirit.

[as83rrzz]

Reposting my Müller biography

THIS POST DOES NOT SUPPORT THE N*ZI IDEOLOGY, IT IS PURELY EDUCATIONAL

Heinrich Müller [28 April 1900 - Unknown date of death] was a high-ranking Schutzstaffel [SS] officer and police official of the N*zi Reich. Müller was born in Munich, Germany to a catholic household. During the last year of the First World War [1918], Müller provided himself as a pilot for an artillery spotting unit in the Luftstreitkräfte, and was accorded on multiple occasions for bravery, [The Iron Cross First and Second Class, Bavarian Pilots Badge, and Bavarian Military Merit Cross Second Class with Swords].

After the end of the First World War, Müller joined the Bavarian Police as an auxiliary worker in 1919, witnessing the suppression of the Communist and Red Army risings in Munich during the Bavarian Soviet Republic, and developing his enmity of Communism.

Throughout the years of the Weimar Republic, Müller rose quickly through the ranks and secured his place as head of the Munich Political Police Department.

While in his SS career, Müller was acquainted with many members of the N*zi Party [NSDAP], These members including Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler. Müller was generally seen as a supporter of the Bavarian People's Party [The predominant party, ruling Bavaria at the time] during the Weimar period. On 9 March 1933, the N*zi putsch deposed the Bavarian government that Müller held the title Minister-President of. Müller commanded his superiors to perform force against the N*zi movement. These actions influenced Müller's rise and as a result, Müller was promoted to Polizeiobersekretär, in May 1933 and then Criminal Inspector, in November 1933.

Heinrich Müller joined the Schutzstaffel [SS] in 1934 and by 1936, Müller was its operations chief. Müller was then promoted to the Standartenführer [colonel] rank in 1937, following on to 1938 when Müller was made Inspector of the Security Police for the entirety of Austria. One of Müller's first major acts that stood out was on 9-10 November 1938, when Müller directed the arrest of 20,000-30,000 Jews. Müller was also tasked by Reinhard Heydrich during the summer of 1939 to construct a centrally organized authority to handle the eventual emigration of the Jews.

Although Müller was part of the N*zi movement, Müller had a preference for the Red Army, admiring the Soviet police and publicly comparing Stalin against H¡tler, claiming Stalin performed leadership more preferably. [This of course was very contrast to his previous enmity of Communism].

Müller was made chief of the RSHA [Amt IV], Office/Dept on September 1939. Müller gained the title 'Gestapo Muller' to differentiate him from another Schutzstaffel [SS] general with the name Heinrich Müller.

Müller continued to rise rapidly through the Schutzstaffel [SS] ranks, becoming an SS-Oberführer in October 1939, and then the rank Gruppenführer and Lieutenant General of the Police in November 1941.

Concluding with Müller's disappearance, Müller was last reported being seen in the Führerbunker, on the evening of 30 April 1945, the date of H¡tler's suicide. Müller's cause of death or the whereabouts of his remains have not been confirmed, but it is suggested that Müller was either killed by the Russians or had committed suicide during the fall of Berlin. If Müller's body has indeed been recovered, it was not identified.

#reichblr #schutzstaffel #heinrich müller

[masha-nikita]

How do one create a personal website to store all their art in it? I've been craving to do so in ages but just can't seem to get the hang of how to operate Wix.

Wix is not difficult to operate, the hard part is to design it. If you follow its guidance, you'd end up with ugly results.

These are the sites I own-

I store my ancient junks in this one.

I still love the Death of Stalin fandom.

It is for my conspiracy theories fandom (yea that is a fandom)

I advertised myself as a Wix designer using these 2 samples sites-

01／02

I did get a little bit of commissions here and there, like these ones-

01 ／ 02 ／ 03 ／ 04 ／ 05 ／ 06 ／ 07 ／ 08

But I don't do it anymore, because the motherfucker from 08 refused to pay me, reason being I unlawfully modified her art (I make that eye blinking animation for her OC). People never give you any materials to work with, I come up with everything myself. Not worth it.

Nowadays I make things simple, because I am old and lazy.

01 ／ 02 ／ 03

Yeah that's about it. But let me tell you, Wix blog is janky AH. But since websites are not social media, they are just "media", the company leaves your stuff alone. I believe backups are by far more secure over there.

#websites

[dresden-syndrome]

Tell us a bit about your original whumpy world! What is it like?

-- @whumperofworlds

✨Thank you for asking!! Sorry for the long response, I really appreciate your curiosity!🥰

❇️After Germany lost the WW2, it was split to four occupation zones, with three of them governed by countries of the West and the fourth given to the USSR. The country spent a few years in poverty and uncertainty while the victorious superpower nations argued over its future, until in October 1949 the fate of Germany's Soviet part was sealed.

✳️Using their political powers and status, the USSR made it into a communist satellite state - German Democratic Republic. From that point, the alternative history timeline begins.

❇️The Soviets promoted their chosen candidate, Klaus Weninger, to rule the newly found state. Being an orthodox Soviet Marxist-Leninist with a tyrannical side, Weninger proudly considered himself "Comrade Stalin's first disciple", determined to rebuild East Germany by the Soviet dictator's views.

✳️As more Eastern European states started turning Communist by that time, he decided to take matter in his own hands. Suffering from USSR's pressure, these states were more eager to unite on European lands rather than stay under Kremlin's direct control. With Stalin's approval, Weninger's party began the unification process, and by the end of 1950 six countries formed their own communist state governed by East Germany: the EESU.

❇️Klaus Weninger aimed for a fast effective country restoration in his radical order. The EESU government was quick to estabilish the ideological basis. The ECP (European Communist Party) dominated over the state, declaring all opposing political parties illegal.

✳️Open displays of propaganda backed by material support became a common thing. With raising quality and stability of life, the people were worried yet quite supportive at first. But by the time the political tyranny started to show its claws, it was already too late.

❇️The first obstacle in the new state's life was the divided capital, Berlin. After lots of conflicts, with the help of the USSR and China Berlin was fully united by the end of 1953. There wasn't such thing as the Berlin wall in EESU - their infamous Cold War wall was way larger. A wall on the EESU - West Germany border, building since 1957. The Great Wall of Germany.

✳️The EESU's relationships with the West were extremely difficult, often balancing on the verge of an armed conflict. It led to a constant threat of the next World War both in the government and common folks' life.

❇️Children learned the basic military skills and evacuation plans from a young age, military bases and bunkers emerged near every town, calls for peace and bread were shouted alongside with "war to the West".

✳️EESU often imposed martial law in regions or the country as a whole, most of the times without fully informing citizens of the reasons behind, doubling down on terror, propaganda and surveillance for all the population affected. More often than not it became either cause or consequence of civil unrest.

❇️Science, healthcare and technological progress were one of the EESU's priorities. Careers in STEM and medical fields were highly respected and encouraged, lots of young scientists from EESU, USSR and China contributed to the country's advance, new hospitals and research facilities appeared at the record rate. By mid 1960s EESU was already recognized as having one of the most efficient healthcare systems in the world.

✳️Their dirty little secret? Advanced State Research. The strictly confidential country-wide program specifically for human experiments, obtaining the subjects from State Security prisons. With those regarded irredeemable (class 4) any tests, scientific or not, were justified by the government with no legal repercussions.

❇️Ah yes, human rights. Officially the EESU had a constitution, guaranteeing everyone's rights, duties, freedom and dignity. It's only that the ideology was above all laws. And it didn't worked during the martial law. And "everyone" there meant "every politically loyal one". And nobody was safe from being accused of political crimes. Not to mention the EESU political criminal classification in which the "irredeemable" offenders were legally deprived of the human status itself. A true democracy.

💫Sorry it turned out so long! If you've read it so far, treat yourself with something tasty for endurance, you deserved it!💫

#whump #whump community #whumpblr #historical whump #military whump #whump ask #ask answered #count it as an endurance test lmao

[tomorrowusa]

Shocker, Putin wins his own rigged election!

If Trump wins in the US in 2024 expect the 2028 election to go something like Russia's bad parody of democracy this weekend.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was slated to win the country's presidential election, state-run exit polls showed Sunday. The government-run VTsIOM pollster showed the 71-year-old had won a landslide, having secured an estimated 88% of the vote in the three-day election that included no real opposition candidates. The exit polls were released following the closure of polling stations in Russia's westernmost region of Kaliningrad on Sunday evening. If confirmed, the result would be a record for Putin, who received 76.7% of the vote in the last presidential election in 2018. The former KGB spy would become Russia's longest-serving leader in more than 200 years, overtaking Josef Stalin.

One way to drive up turnout is to force people to vote.

‘Forced to vote’ Election watchdog warns of likely voter coercion as early lines form outside Russian polling stations

#russia #dictatorship #rigged election #vladimir putin #stalinism #fascism #totalitarianism #donald trump #фальсифицированные выборы #россия #диктатура #владимир путин #путин хуйло #долой путина #путлер #тоталитаризм #россия - террористическая страна #союз постсоветских клептократических ватников #путин – это лжедмитрий iv а не пётр великий #трамп - путинский пудель

[warsofasoiaf]

What's the tea on Sheila Fitzpatrick? Haven't gotten around to any of her work yet

Sheila Fitzpatrick is one of the prominent historians of the "revisionist" school of the Soviet Union, which emerged as a response to the "totalitarian" or "traditionalist" school that was prominent earlier, such as Robert Conquest. Fitzpatrick's most notable contributions to history come from the perspective of the lower classes of the Soviet Union, that the Soviet Union was not a singular ideological monolith driven from the top-down and that it had to respond to social forces within its own nation. In many ways, it's actually a welcome revision from the 1950's era of Soviet historiography, and the scholarship produced has increased the overall level of historical understanding.

For herself, Sheila Fitzpatrick is perhaps most notable for her "people's history" of the Soviet Union, one divorced from ideology and focused mostly on social mobility and the experiences of the peasantry and line workers. Perhaps most controversially (and what I was referencing in the earlier post), is that Fitzpatrick contends that the Great Purge and Stalinism was an albeit brutal form of democratic revolution, due to the people that were able to move into the places of those purged and experience social advancement. Stalin secured a way of public buy-in through a newly-empowered cadre of middle-class individuals to achieve legitimacy for his government and secure popular buy-in.

Now, of course, to outside observers, this is nonsense. Murdering people and distributing their stuff to other people is not a viable method of securing popular buy-in or achieving democracy. But because the purged were "class enemies," Fitzpatrick identifies them as "bourgeoise" and "executives," somehow this confers the action a form of legitimacy not seen in other historical or scholarly analysis - it was okay to exterminate them because others were able to benefit, conferring the idea that the people being purged were inherently less worthy than the people who benefitted. Similarly, Fitzpatrick, who took great pains to minimize the effect of ideology within the Soviet Union, is singularly unable to answer the question of why these targets were deemed acceptable in the first place - though ideology provides a very clear outline as to why such "class enemies" would be exterminated. Since such scholarship would be seen as antithetical to the revisionist school, however, it had to be discarded, which undermines the authenticity and accuracy of historical scholarship.

What bothers me about Fitzpatrick is that this is not considered a fringe belief of an otherwise respectable historian, but that this is considered a valid interpretation of a period of history with implications delivered further into the present. To Fitzpatrick's scholarship, it's *okay* to murder undesirables provided that they're the correct undesirables (a big problem given the rise in the justification of violence toward groups deemed to be subhuman - just look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine). Now, this is hardly unusual from a Marxist perspective - Orthodox Marxism depends on the categorical extermination of undesirables to achieve its desired societal utopia, but Fitzpatrick is no tankie and is in fact, quite critical of Stalin, otherwise, but has to find ways to mitigate his atrocities so he's not relegated as a monster.

This has been the case for a lot of contemporary historical scholarship with the Soviet Union. There's a significant number of false equivalencies in Soviet scholarship, such as the Great Purges or Khrushchev's forcible medication of dissidents with McCarthyism, in order to mute criticism of the Soviet Union and reject the notion of it as a censorious and ideologically-driven state. Contextually speaking, a lot of history scholars came to prominence as members of the New Left, whose anti-Vietnam War activism sought to portray the Soviet Union as a defensive, anti-imperialist, and progressive power despite all evidence to the contrary, and has similarly translated into hostility against new scholarship that brings sharper criticism of the Soviet Union into the fore. This was the case with Haynes and Klehr, whose translations of the VENONA cipher decrypts and exposure of the CPUSA's role in Soviet espionage was met with abject vituperation from the leaders of history departments - specifically and explicitly because it serves to provide evidence that undermines their core, tribal thesis. Such hostility to new scholarship, particularly that which is based in evidence instead of interpretation, is nothing short of a failure in history departments in their core mission.

Thanks for the question, Hex.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

#history #sheila fitzpatrick #soviet union

[afranse]

Человек из петербургской подворотни

Поднят был каким-то образом наверх,

И за ним уже страна вполоборота

В подворотню опустилась, как на грех.

Убивать, пытать чекиста научили -

Он войной пытает матушку Россию.

С предводителем чекистским весь народ в ней

Опустился к петербургской подворотне.

Убивать, пытать - он верует в насилье.

Убивать, пытать за ним идёт Россия.

Убивать, пытать - в стране идёт зачистка,

Чтоб дошли в ней все до уровня чекиста.

И не вынуть из чекиста подворотни,

Комфортабельно ему наоборот в ней.

Он как Сталин покорить соседей хочет.

Но как Николай Второй свой путь закончит.

######################

A KGB man from a St. Petersburg gateway

Was lifted up to lead the country.

And following up his steps Russia

Sank into the gateway and doesn’t look funky.

KGB man was trained to kill and torture.

And he tortures Russia with a war making draftees his prey.

Following up a chekist guidance

Russia downgraded to the level of the St. Petersburg gateway.

Killing and torturing are his signature skills, chekist trusts only in violence.

Russia embraced bloody path to his goals under his vicious guidance.

Killing and torturing - cleansing goes on by his warmongering plan.

So that everyone descends in Russia to the level of a KGB man.

It’s impossible to separate with the gateway kremlin security officer,

On the contrary, he feels comfortable only with the backstreet offers.

He dreams about being like Stalin returning

And conquering more foreign lands.

But like Nicholas II he’ll finish his journey

Shot by his former fans.

#книга #стихи #поэзия #литература #poetry #песня #русский блог #искусство #акунин #россия #украина #хамас #русский tumblr #политика #история #politics #history #деспот #сталин #чекист